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The History and Psychology of Labyrinths

A golden labyrinth or maze
The labyrinth symbolizes the winding path of life: not a puzzle to be solved, but a journey to be lived.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 22 July 2026.

What’s the difference between a maze and a labyrinth—and why are they making a comeback? Once thought of as little more than decorative curiosities, they are increasingly being rediscovered as places of reflection, meditation, and healing. To understand why, we must go back to the most famous labyrinth of them all.

The Cretan Labyrinth

In Greek myth, King Minos, to consolidate his position on the Cretan throne, asked the god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of divine favour. But instead of sacrificing the bull as he ought to have done, he decided to keep it for his stud farm. Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife Pasiphaë lust for the bull.

Pasiphaë pleaded with the master craftsman Daedalus to build her a hollow cow in which to hide out with the bull. Daedalus’ cow seemed so true to life that the bull mounted it. Some time later, Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

The Minotaur, as he grew, became increasingly violent and even began eating people. Fearing that his subjects would rise against him, Minos sought to contain his stepson in a series of ever stronger cages; but after he broke out of the strongest cage, he asked Daedalus to build a maze of tunnels beneath his palace.

The Labyrinth, as it came to be called, was so intricate that even Daedalus, having built it, struggled to escape from it. The Labyrinth served Minos well, enabling him to intimidate and dispose of his enemies while also hiding and feeding the Minotaur—who now would eat nothing but human flesh.

Theseus to the Rescue

Minos, Minotaur aside, was a great king. Under his rule, Crete prospered and grew into a naval power. When his eldest son Androgeus came of age, he travelled to Athens to partake in the Panathenaic Games. Somehow Androgeus died—or was killed—and Minos held Athens responsible for his loss.

In reparation, and as the price for peace, King Minos required that King Aegeus send him, every nine years, a tribute of seven of the most noble youths and seven of the most virtuous maidens of Athens. These unfortunates, drawn by lots, would be sent to Crete in a ship with black sails, paraded before the people, and cast into the Labyrinth.

When the time came for the third nine-yearly tribute to Crete, Theseus, the son and heir of Aegeus, volunteered to take the place of one of the fourteen unfortunates and confront the Minotaur. He sailed for Crete in a ship with black sails, promising his ailing father that, if victorious, he would return on white sails. As he was paraded through the streets of the Cretan capital, Minos’ daughter Ariadne saw him and immediately fell in love with him. He and the other Athenians were locked up in a dungeon to await morning, when they would be fed to the Minotaur.

That evening, Ariadne begged Daedalus, until he relented, to disclose the secret of the Labyrinth. Under the cover of darkness, she ran past the guards to Theseus and slipped him a sword and a clew of crimson thread. She instructed him to tie the thread at the mouth of the Labyrinth and unfurl the clew as he went along, ‘always straight, always down, and never left or right.’ 

Before leaving, she made him promise that, if he came out alive, he would take her with him and marry her.

As Theseus descended into the darkness, the air became putrid and he began tripping over what must have been human remains. He could hear the thumping of the Minotaur, but could not locate him until he could also hear his breathing. He may never have seen him had it not been for the blood-tinged ivory of his eyes and horns.

With his head down, the Minotaur made to gore him, but he leapt in Cretan style over his horns, rolled over, drew out his sword, and drove it up to where he imagined he had his heart. 

He then picked up the clew and wound it back up to find his way out of the Labyrinth… and into the waiting arms of Ariadne.

History or Myth?

In the early twentieth century, the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, working on Crete, uncovered the remains of a complex civilization whose people he called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos.

Minoan Crete flourished from around 3000 to 1500 BCE and came to revolve around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island. The palace at Knossos covered an area of around six acres (or three football pitches) and contained some 1,300 rooms connected by various corridors and stairways, leading Evans to speculate that the mythical Labyrinth was none other than the palace itself.

Pottery and frescoes unearthed by Evans and his team featured bulls and bull-leaping, and the most common symbol on palace walls was the labrys, or double axe—and it has been suggested, including by Evans himself, that Labyrinth might mean something like ‘Sanctuary of the Double Axe’.

The reconstructed palace at Knossos. Its network of rooms and corridors may have inspired the legend of the Labyrinth. Photo: Neel Burton.

Maze or Labyrinth?

Although the Labyrinth was clearly a branching, multicursal maze, it has long been represented—for example, on Cretan coins—as a single-path, unicursal maze in which it is impossible to get lost.

As a result, the word ‘labyrinth’, although essentially synonymous with ‘maze’, has come to connote unicursality, while the word ‘maze’ has come to connote multicursality.

In short, a maze offers choices; a labyrinth offers a single path.

A Universal Symbol

In his Natural History, the naturalist Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) describes four ancient labyrinths—in Egypt, Crete, Lemnos, and Italy—all of which seem to have been enclosed multicursal complexes, confirming that this is the ancient, original meaning of the word ‘labyrinth’.

In the Histories, the historian Herodotus (d. 425 BCE) claims that the Egyptian labyrinth surpassed even the pyramids in scale and ambition:

I myself have seen [the Egyptian labyrinth], and no words can tell its wonders: the sum of all that the Greeks have built and wrought would be a matter of less labour and cost than was this single labyrinth…

Far from a mere folly, the labyrinth is, like the serpent, the flood, and the trinity, something of a Jungian archetype, found in prehistoric rock drawings at, for example, Pontevedra in Galicia (Spain), Val Camonica in Lombardy (Italy), and Rocky Valley in Cornwall (England).

In medieval Europe, cathedrals sometimes contained a labyrinth traced out in the nave from contrasting paving stones. Those that have survived, such as the striking one in Chartres Cathedral, can still be walked today. Cathedral labyrinths were not simply ludic or ornamental but represented the spiritual path to God and provided a substitute for going on pilgrimage. Cathedral labyrinths were therefore unicursal, as were the first hedge mazes, which evolved from Renaissance knot gardens.

The Journey of Life

As I argue in The Meaning of Myth, mazes and labyrinths are in fact spiritual tools. Multicursal mazes such as the Cretan Labyrinth may have been built not only to guard against gold diggers but also to deter or trap evil spirits, including the Minotaur. Unicursal labyrinths, on the other hand, may have been traced to guide rituals or dances.

The circular unicursal labyrinth symbolizes the cosmos, completeness, and unity, and, by extension, the spiritual path or journey of life. More than a simple garden, it is a removed, secluded, and liminal space that serves to calm and concentrate the mind—which is why labyrinths, often simply mown into a summer field, are increasingly to be found in therapeutic settings such as hospitals and hospices. Labyrinths, especially single-path, unicursal ones, serve not only as a thing of beauty but also, above all, as an aid to meditation and mindfulness.

Ariadne’s Thread

To walk the labyrinth is to re-enter the womb and travel inward, and to come back out is a kind of rebirth. Ariadne’s crimson thread is thus an umbilical cord that ties Theseus to the world while he undertakes the hero’s journey into the underworld and slays the monster.

To escape the Labyrinth, Theseus simply followed the clew, or clue. This revised spelling of clew, ‘a ball of thread or yarn’, underwent a sense shift from around 1600 in reference to Theseus and the Minotaur, giving us the modern word clue and, more recently, clueless.

The path to wisdom is never a straight one; every twist and turn, every up and down, is part of the journey.

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How the Serpent Came to Represent Life and Death, Poison and Cure, Fear and Wisdom

A hissing snake on a staff

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

Few creatures carry as many contradictory meanings as the snake. Across cultures, the serpent has come to represent life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom.

A snake is an animal; a serpent is also an idea.

For thousands of years, snakes have slithered through our myths and dreams, sometimes as monsters or tempters, sometimes as healers, protectors, and teachers. Even today, more than two thousand years after Hippocrates, the snake remains the pre-eminent symbol of medicine and allied professions.

How did one animal come to represent so many apparently contradictory things?

Snakes and Seers

In myth, snakes, or serpents, are often connected to seers and oracles.

Teiresias is the most notorious seer in Greek myth. As a young man, he came upon a pair of coupling serpents on Mount Cithaeron and, in disgust, struck them with his staff. This offended the goddess Hera, who turned him into a woman.

Teiresias spent the next seven years as a priestess of Hera, and even married and had children in that time. After seven years as a woman, he once again chanced upon a pair of coupling serpents, but this time gave them a wide berth. Seeing this, Hera released him from her curse.

Later, Zeus and Hera dragged Teiresias into an argument about who has the more pleasure in sex: woman, as Zeus claimed, or man, as Hera countered. Teiresias averred that, ‘Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.’ For this, Hera struck him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven generations.

Already, the serpent is associated with transgression, gender, sexuality, punishment, and knowledge or wisdom.

Ancient Oracles

The ancients took divination extremely seriously. Leaders would consult an oracle or seer before any major undertaking. Aristotle, that paragon of logic and reason, even wrote a lesser-known treatise entitled On Divination in Sleep.

Oracles were considered superior to seers because they had a direct channel to God, or a god. They were, however, difficult to consult, each with their own seasons and capricious conditions, such that most of the demand for divination was met by seers like Teiresias.

The oracular tradition may have originated with the oracle of the Egyptian goddess Wadjet at Per-Wadjet, near modern-day Alexandria. Wadjet was depicted as a snake—usually an Egyptian cobra—or as a combined woman and snake. She nursed the infant Horus and protected Ra by coiling herself upon his head.

The snake goddess figurines excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos may have been connected to Wadjet, as may the uraeus, the stylised upright cobra used as a symbol of sovereignty and divine authority, and mounted upon the crowns and masks of the pharaohs—including, famously, Tutankhamun.

So long before the serpent came to symbolise evil in the Christian imagination, it could represent protection, sovereignty, divinity, secret knowledge, and insight or wisdom.

The Fear of Snakes

But there is a more primitive reason for the snake’s hold upon our imagination: snakes frighten us.

Ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, is one of the most common specific phobias. Whereas many anxiety disorders tend to take hold in adulthood, specific phobias such as ophidiophobia and arachnophobia often go back to early childhood, perhaps because they relate to the sorts of dangers that threatened our remote ancestors.

Today, man-made hazards such as motor cars and electric cables are much more likely to strike us down, yet our most primitive fears remain disproportionately attached to natural dangers. Unlike snakes, technological innovations have not been around for long enough to haunt us—sorry, ‘imprint themselves onto our genomes’.

The snake strikes our imagination not despite our fear of it, but in part because of that fear. What can kill us must command our attention. 

Poison and Cure

Although the snake can kill us, it can also cure us.

Snake venom is a deadly poison, but its constituents can also have medicinal properties—having been used, for example, to control pain or stem haemorrhage. According to the Book of Numbers, Moses erected a bronze serpent upon a pole to save Israelites bitten by the ‘fiery serpents’ sent by God in retribution—thereby turning one snake against another, or others.

The same archetype recurs in the two symbols of the medical profession: the more traditional Rod of Asclepius, god of healing, with one snake; and the more commercial Rod of Hermes, or Caduceus, with two snakes. The rod or staff represents control over the dual nature of the snake, or the Moses-like harnessing of its powers. 

It is one of medicine’s oldest truisms, that many a substance is a cure, until it becomes a poison. Like a sorcerer, a doctor is an expert at measuring poisons.

Death and Rebirth

It is for more than their venom that serpents came to stand at the threshold of life and death. Snakes live close to the ground and disappear into holes and crevices, connecting them in the imagination with the nourishing earth and the underworld. More strikingly, they shed their skins, seeming to cast off their old bodies and emerge anew. It is not difficult to see how they became symbols of rebirth and immortality—and, by extension, of creativity, culture, and wisdom.

The ouroboros—Greek for ‘tail eater’—depicts a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in Egypt and later passing into the Greek mystery cults, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, it symbolises the circle of life: destruction continually giving rise to creation, death folding back into birth. The ouroboros may also symbolise sexual intercourse, with the tail representing the male organ and the mouth the female one.

The Serpent of Eden

The most notorious serpent of all is the one in Eden, at the foot of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

According to the Book of Genesis, the serpent is the most ‘subtil’ of all the beasts in God’s creation and, like Adam and Eve, has the ability to speak and reason. The only other animal that speaks in the Pentateuch is Balaam’s ass, and then only because God opened its mouth. Seduced by the serpent, Eve, and then Adam, ate of the tree, and ‘the eyes of them both were opened.’ As well as casting Adam and Eve out of Eden, as we remember only too well, God cursed the serpent to go on his belly and eat dust, and put enmity between the serpent and man:

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The serpent introduces poison, death, and seduction into Eden, but, like the tree itself, it also brings knowledge and enlightenment. Unlike the lamb or the lion, the snake cannot easily be made to stand for one thing. Instead, it stands for the antinomies of the human condition: life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom. And so it endures.

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It is striking that the great thinkers, from Aristotle to Augustine and Mencius to Montaigne, devoted so much of their time and thought to friendship, but almost none of either to marriage. Grayling’s timely treatise reacquaints us with a great but forgotten good that promises to fulfil so many of our practical, intellectual, emotional, and metaphysical needs. The book principally consists of a history of the philosophy of friendship capped by an account of canonical, often homosexual or homosocial friendships such as that of Achilles and Patroclus and Jonathan and David, who, in the Bible, describes the love of Jonathan as “better even than that of women”. Throughout, Grayling seeks to define friendship and, in so doing, explores its many forms, facets, charms, and consolations.

Perhaps in a desire to be modern, relevant, or politic, Grayling seems to reject the classical notion that, at its best and most meaningful, friendship is a highly elitist good. For the greats, only virtuous men can be ideal friends. Aristotle famously says that, while there are many ways for men to be bad, there is only one way for them to be good, and it is precisely in this sense that an ideal friend is ‘another self’—a historically important notion that Grayling severally dismisses. Because they are all one and the same, virtuous men are predictable, reliable, and therefore worthy of one another’s friendship. In contrast, bad people are in some way unlike themselves, and just as likely to hate other bad people as anyone else.

In my opinion, Plato, whom Grayling underrates, advances by far the most subtle and sophisticated of all theories of friendship, one far superior even to that of Aristotle. Despite the extravagant praise that he lavishes upon friendship, Aristotle is quite clear that the best and happiest life is not that spent in friendship, but in the contemplation of those things that are most true and therefore most beautiful and most dependable. There is a contradiction here: if the best life is a life of contemplation, then friendship is either superfluous or inimical to the best life, and therefore undeserving of the high praise that Aristotle lavishes upon it. It may be, as Aristotle tentatively suggests, that friendship is needed because it promotes contemplation, or that contemplation is only possible some of the time and friendship is needed the rest of the time, or even that a life of friendship is just as good as a life of contemplation. So much for Aristotle, one might say.

Plato’s Lysis may seem to fail in its task of defining friendship, but one should never take Plato or his mouthpiece Socrates at face value. There is far more to the Lysis than a couple of interesting but misguided thoughts on friendship. By discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is not only discussing friendship, but also demonstrating to the youths that, even though they count each other as close friends, they do not really know what friendship is, and that, whatever friendship is, it is something far deeper and far more meaningful than the puerile ‘friendship’ that they share. In contrast to the youths, Socrates knows perfectly well what friendship is, and is only feigning ignorance so as to teach the youths: ‘…and I, an old boy, who would fain be one of you…’ More than that, by discussing friendship with Lysis and Menexenus as he does, Socrates is himself in the process of befriending them. He befriends them not with pleasant banter or gossipy chitchat, as most people ‘befriend’ one another, but with the kind of philosophical conversation that is the hallmark of the deepest and most meaningful of friendships. In the course of this philosophical conversation, he tells the youths that he should ‘greatly prefer a real friend to all the gold of Darius’, thereby signifying not only that he places friendship on the same high pedestal as philosophy, to which he has devoted (and will sacrifice) his life, but also that the kind of friendship that he has in mind is so rare and uncommon that even he does not possess it. If friendship ultimately escapes definition, then this is because, like philosophy, friendship is not so much a thing-in-itself as it is a process for becoming. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. For Plato, friendship and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.

Just as philosophy leads to friendship, so friendship leads to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s most important work on friendship (although not generally recognized as such—Grayling fails to mention it), Socrates and Phaedrus go out into the idyllic countryside just outside Athens and have a long conversation about the anatomy of the soul, the nature of true love, the art of persuasion, and the merits of the spoken over the written word. At the end of this conversation, Socrates offers a prayer to the local deities. This is the famous Socratic Prayer, which is notable both in itself and for the response that it elicits from Phaedrus.

Socrates: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry. —Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.

Phaedrus: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.

Plato may fail to define friendship in the Lysis, but in the Phaedrus he gives us its living embodiment. Socrates and Phaedrus spend their time together enjoying the beautiful Attic countryside while engaging in honest and open philosophical conversation. By exercising and building upon reason, they are not only furthering each other’s understanding, but also transforming a life of friendship into a life of joint contemplation of those things that are most true and hence most beautiful and most dependable. If only on the basis of his response to the Socratic Prayer, it is obvious that Phaedrus is another self to Socrates, since he makes the same choices as Socrates and even justifies making those choices on the grounds that their friendship requires it. Whereas Aristotle and Grayling try to tell us what friendship is, Plato lets us feel it in all its allure and transformative power.